The Settlement of Germantown 1683-1719 and the Beginning of Germantown Meeting Randal L Whitman 2020

1 The Settlement of Germantown 1683-1719 and the beginning of Germantown Meeting Randal L Whitman 2020 Germantown got its name because the first settlers were Quakers from Germany—even though they were ethnically and linguistically Dutch, and all converted Mennonites. It all makes a good story, but I will start it with the Mennonites, a century before George Fox and his ideas. Gathering settlers Menno Simons (1492-1561) was a Dutch Catholic priest who, in the middle of the 16th century, first articulated the views that became the fundamental basis of Mennonism. The “worst” part of these, among many heresies--as far as Catholicism was concerned, and Lutheranism, too, in its turn--was the rejection of infant baptism in favor of adult baptism1. Menno attracted many Dutch followers who were severely persecuted, even in Holland, where “there were put to death for this cause at Rotterdam seven persons, Haarlem ten, the Hague thirteen, Curtrijk twenty, Brugge twenty-three, Amsterdam twenty-six…” 2. Holland would develop in the next century into the most liberal and tolerant nation in Europe, but rather too late for the Mennonites. Many Dutch Mennonites fled in the 16th century, mostly into other Teutonic areas of northern Europe, especially up the Rhine River, to a region called the Palatinate. One such group came to Crefeld, and settled there, a Mennonite community. Crefeld was a town on the Rhine, about half-way from Amsterdam to Frankfort, in the Duchy of Cleves, a state of the Holy Roman Empire, which was officially Catholic. After 1614, following political developments, Cleves, with Crefeld, became a part of the Margravate of Brandenburg, a part of Prussia, also a state of the Holy Roman Empire. After a while, the Mennonites were noticed, and repression began anew. The Mennonites were receptive in the 1670s to touring and proselytizing Friends, including George Fox, Robert Barclay, William Penn and others, newly spreading the Quaker Word. Many Mennonites converted. In particular, a Quaker meeting was formed in 1679 in Crefeld, part of Amsterdam Yearly Meeting and made up of 100% former Dutch Mennonites. But Lutheran Prussia3 soon became about as unsympathetic to Friends as they were to Mennonites, and subsequently both Mennonite and Friends communities were persecuted, including the new Quakers of Crefeld. In 1682, William Penn acquired the Proprietorship of Pennsylvania from the English crown in settlement of debts the crown owed his father. Penn resolved to create a colony run by Friends and devoted to religious freedom there.4 Aware of the persecutions, and eager to promote settlement of Pennsylvania, he wrote letters and tracts to those he had encountered on his travels, urging resettlement of these oppressed communities. He found ready ears in both Crefeld’s Quakers and among the German Pietists of Frankfort, a Lutheran sect that believed in infant baptism, but otherwise had many views rather like both Mennonites and Friends. Two important 1 Mennonism was a mostly Dutch sect of the anabaptist strand of the Protestant Reformation. 2 Quoted in Samuel Pennypacker, The Settlement of Germantown, William J Campbell, Philadelphia 1899. Page 10. 3 Although the Holy Roman Empire was Catholic, at this time it tolerated a state’s adherence to Lutheranism if the state preferred. 4 See An Holy Experiment, the fourth essay in this series, for a fuller story of Penn’s venture. 2 differences, however, were that the Pietists tended to be relatively wealthy, and even better, they were not under persecution. Francis Daniel Pastorius, usually called Daniel, was a wealthy young and idealistic Lutheran German from Frankfort. He trained in the law and in languages, and at the age of 29 took a two-year tour of Europe to apprise himself of the region’s moral tone. He returned to Frankfort in November of 1682, discouraged and disenchanted. There he found congenial support from the Pietists. They told him of their plans to go to Penn’s New World to live an ordered and moral life. Pastorius became enthusiastic about this endeavor and decided to go himself. More importantly, he became the Pietists’ agent, intending to prepare the way for them. Later, in 1686 the Pietists formed the Frankfort Company, with Pastorius again their legal agent in Pennsylvania, to manage their land-holdings there. The Frankfort Company did more than buy and sell land; it also arranged, in exchange for indentured service, to cover the costs of transportation from Germany to Philadelphia for those who could not themselves afford the trip, the contract stipulating that on arrival the immigrants shall “report themselves to Francis Daniel Pastorius.” Now, in March of 1683, Pastorius set off down the Rhine River to go to England to find Penn and buy land for the Pietists. Along the way he came to Crefeld, where he recruited the community of Friends to this venture. They were more than ready! Some Crefelders, such as Jacob Telner and Jan Streypers, had already bought land from Penn, but no specific plans for resettlement had yet been made. In the end, resettlement of Crefeld’s Quakers would be almost complete. While thirteen families made the trip in 1683, by 1685 all but one family of the Quakers in Crefeld had picked up and gone to Germantown. This and the subsequent removal to Germantown of not-too-distant Cresheim’s Quakers, also mostly former Dutch Mennonites, in the next few years suggests the degree of misery that religious persecution had brought them. Suppression had been intense, and Pastorius must have been compelling. Perhaps it was simply the fact that while the Quaker proselytizers all spoke English, Pastorius spoke to the Crefelders in Dutch, one of his eight languages). But mostly it was probably the transparent fact that he was, even as he spoke, On His Way to the New World, and promised he would be there to help them. Crefeld Friends said they would follow him--and did, about six weeks later. Pastorius continued to London where he found that Penn had already gone to Philadelphia aboard the Welcome the previous summer. Still, he was able to buy 15,000 acres, later increased to 25,000 acres, from Penn’s London agent. And then he took ship aboard the America. Among those aboard ship was Thomas Lloyd, an aristocratic Welsh Friend on his way to Philadelphia to help Penn run his new colony. Lloyd and Pastorius became good friends, having many long conversations in Latin--Pastorius’ proficiency in English not yet comfortably achieved. The America arrived in Philadelphia late in August 1683. There he quickly found Penn and told him, to Penn’s delight, of the coming Germans. Pastorius immediately built himself a “cave,” a crude shelter best thought of as a covered hole-in-the-ground, in Philadelphia (see Fig. 1). His cave was located on what is now 502 South Front Street, facing the river. On the lintel above his door, Pastorius wrote the motto, Parva domus sed amica Bonis procul este Prophani (My home is small but friendly to the Good, the Profane stay without). Penn, when he read it, laughed aloud. The Crefelders followed on the ship Comfort, arriving on October 6, 1683 after a relatively peaceful journey. There were 42 of them, in 13 families that debarked in Philadelphia. Because time was short before winter came, Penn hastened the process and on October 24 Penn’s Surveyor-General Thomas Fairman surveyed fourteen lots, seven on either side of a trail that 3 would become “Main Street,” and ultimately Germantown Avenue. The following morning the Crefeld settlers crowded into Pastorius’ cave to draw lots. Having drawn, they trekked two hours, about six miles, out to their new homesites, which consisted of a thick woodland through which ran a rough Indian trail. This trail ran along a ridge that separated two watersheds, the Wissahickon and Wingohocking Creeks, both of which would be very important in the future of the community5. The settlers began digging out their caves. Fig. 1 Image of a cave from Keyser, History of Old Germantown, pg 31 The lots were numbered 1 (closest to Philadelphia) through 7, to the east and to the west along the track and were mostly about 50 acres in size. Each lot was seen as coming in two parts: the main part was the long and narrow 25 acres adjacent to the future “Main Street”, supplemented by another 25 acres elsewhere. Some lots made up this second amount in land below the first lots (“side lots”). In this paper and on the map (Fig. 2), I am varying from the “official” direction descriptors originally used: my lot “#1 East” was called “Lot No. 1 toward Bristol” and “#1 West” was “Lot No. 1 toward Schuylkill.” In the list of names following below (and in the rest of this account), every name was spelled in a variety of ways in the documents where they were found; there’s no telling which spelling was “right.” Furthermore, Dutch naming custom made a father’s first name the middle name of each of his children. Thus, the three Op den Graeff brothers--their sister, too--all shared a middle name, Isaacs, since their father was named Isaac: thus, Dirck Isaacs op den Graeff, Herman Isaacs op den Graeff, and so on. A considerable source of confusion arises because the Dutch additionally recognized as complete names just the first and middle name. Thus, Herman Isaacs Op den Graeff could formally be called, or call himself Herman Isaacs just as rightly as Herman Op den Graeff. As an example of this, it took me a while to understand that Abraham Tunes, on lot #7 West was actually the brother of a later-arriving settler Aret Klincken, of lot #20 West; their father had been named Tunes Klincken.

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